Enhancing visual feedback and interaction between computer users and their machines is a major reason for the growth and acceptance of graphical-user-interfaces (GUIs). Computer users have benefited from the elimination of multiple keystrokes required to accomplish tasks in keyboard based systems. Graphical user interfaces exploit the powerful capabilities of direct manipulation (e.g., a set of standard techniques that let a user handle electronic objects in ways similar to the way corresponding objects are handled in the physical world). Direct manipulation is the electronic procedure of directly applying one or more actions to an object. For example, a user wishing to print a document in a GUI can, with a mouse or other pointing device, drag an icon representing the document (the source object) to an icon representing a printer (the target object), and drop the document icon on the printer to print the document. Similarly, the user wishing to place an electronic document in a particular file, may drag the electronic document icon (the source object) to a file folder icon (the target object) and drop it thereon, causing the electronic document to be appropriately filed. While the above described direct manipulation protocol allows multiple actions to be combined into a single drag/drop operation, the protocol suffers when the user needs to specify a series of user-defined actions on a single object. Users are restricted to standard actions within the GUI and are not allowed to augment or modify the standard operations provided by the GUI designers. Users are thus restricted to altering the source object or the target object when alterations are needed. For example, if a user wanted to print a document after removing embedded formatting tags (i.e., characters attached to a set of data containing information about the set), a series of steps would be required. First, the user needs to perform an &lt;EDIT&gt; operation on the document to remove the embedded tags. The edited document could then be dragged to a printer icon to perform the print operation. There is no known procedure or apparatus that provides a user with the above described edit and print capability in a single continuous drag/drop operation. Additionally, GUI users should have the capability of defining at the time an action is taken whether warning messages should be displayed. A direct manipulation procedure is needed that will allow experienced computer users to suppress confirmation messages. Experienced users should be allowed to perform risky actions (i.e. DELETE, SHRED, etc) without augmentation keys or options settings to turn confirmation messages off.
Consequently, a technique is needed that provides users with a procedure for augmenting or modifying the standard operations provided by system designers of graphical user interfaces.